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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by WhackaWhackaWoo (talk | contribs) at 23:21, 13 March 2005 (→Binary/Octet-Stream Error). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues. Bugs and feature requests should be made at BugZilla since there is no guarantee developers will read this page.

FAQ: Intermittent database lags can make new articles take some minutes to appear, and cause the watchlist, contributions, and page history/old views sometimes not show the very latest changes. This is an ongoing issue we are working on.

Details about the occasional slow speeds and deadlock errors: here

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Technical archive

Discussions older than 7 days (date of last made comment) are moved here. These dicussions will be kept archived for 7 more days. During this period the discussion can be moved to a relevant talk page if appropriate. After 7 days the discussion will be permanently removed.

Servers handling of URLs has died

Well, up until a few days ago, I would get to any article by simply putting in the address bar "www.wikipedia.com/[topic]" and it would work... However now it just displays this real dumb 404 error. It is pretty useless and it reduces some of the simplicity of working the site. (comment was from User:Floydian (Talk - moz.)

Are you sure that wasn't "www.wikipedia.com/wiki/[topic]", which should work? -- Jmabel | Talk 18:31, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)
You need to put en.wikipedia.com/wiki/[topic] in your address bar. You have always need the wiki, but although using en instead of www was always correct, the handling of www changed about the beginning of this year. You also need to put underscores in if [topic] has spaces in it, eg en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Current_events. -gadfium 18:36, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Try .org instead! Noisy | Talk 10:35, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

Well, I know that now you need the /wiki part... But about a week ago I could do it without the /wiki
Its not really annoying to me as its 5 characters... However, it seems pointless that the backend couldn't just add that /wiki in the same way that it changes %20 to an underscore. - Floydian 22:37, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Of course, if you use Firefox, you only need to type wp [topic]. Smoddy (t) (e) 22:56, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
That is incorrect - typing that will merely bring up the first hit on Google for wp [topic], which doesn't have to be Wikipedia.
wikipedia [topic] should work as you want, but only providing that the article exists and that it has been indexed by Google. --Pidgeot (t) (c) (e) 00:55, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it has ended, and I find it severely annoying. Up until bouta week or so ago you could just type wikipedia.com/article. --Alterego 18:12, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)

Recent changes???

The recent changes are not working. I rebooted my PC, purged the caché, edited Muhammad Ali and made a zero-edit in my own user page, which doesn't appear in the RC. Is there another database problem concerning the master/slave databases?? --Neigel von Teighen 16:01, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Live RC is still working, so I've put prominent directions to that in Wikipedia:Recentchanges for the time being. Does anyone know what's going on? —Charles P. (Mirv) 18:09, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
After I added the note to Wikipedia:Recentchanges and purged the cache of Special:Recentchanges, it started working again. I don't know if these two happenings are related in any way or if it was just a lucky coincidence, but the problem seems to be sorted out now. —Charles P. (Mirv) 18:24, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I made changes to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_the_buffalo and they don't appear in the article. If I do an edit, they are still there, but not in the live article as displayed. I've cleared my cached and tried on other computers. The problem persists 12+ hours after posting. Is this a separate issue? Seattle.
I agree that this is strange. I can't see any edits your IP address has made to this article, although User:Dave Cohoe made an edit recently. There have been problems in the last day with one cache not being up to date, but that's supposed to be fixed. Sorry, I can't help you except to reaffirm that something's wrong.-gadfium 07:46, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Working now! PFM! :) Guessing I'm hitting another server that was having problems updating. Dave in Seattle. 07:58, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
If you are Dave, then I was seeing your edit. I also purged the page cache, which may be why you are now seeing it.-gadfium 08:26, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Bummer, I just went back to Donna the buffalo page and all the edits I made are gone. They're not even in history. Any ideas? Dave Cohoe 05:35, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Missing images

Following the recent discussion on Wikien-l about stopping images on Wikepedia, I un-clicked the load images box on the Firefox options page, to see what happened. I then clicked it to restore them and on every web page I look at the images download properly, except Wikipedia. So I have no globe and no pix anywhere each time I run it. As far as I can see there are no changes anywhere on my preferences page, and in any case I don't think we yet have an image disabling function there. Any ideas, anyone? Apwoolrich 18:47, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

And you've cleared your cache, naturally? -- John Fader 19:00, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Yes, no difference Apwoolrich 19:04, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I'm afraid I can't reproduce your problem. If I disable images in firefox, and reload, then images (including the wikipedia globe) indeed aren't shown. If I then re-enable them, and reload, all are visible again, including the wikipedia globe. Are you sure you haven't blocked images some other way too (like adblock) using a domain-specific method? -- John Fader 19:28, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I have the same problem. Missing images, or blank boxes. But it's inconsistant. RickK 09:10, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)
I had the box 'for the originating website only' ticked. Un-ticking it has brought them back in Wikipedia. Does this mean I am getting images from a different website? Apwoolrich 12:05, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Images are served from a dedicated box separate from the main web site. This is done for both performance (frees up HTTPD processes for heavy work) and security (potential JavaScript attack) reasons. --Brion 23:19, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)


Images on Piccadilly Circus

For some reason, every image disappeared after a recent edit! I can still see the images in history but not in the current version - Why is that? Please help. JuntungWu 05:50, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Appears OK to me now. Does it still look wrong to you? -- Jmabel | Talk 06:35, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)
    • Yes, it still looks wrong. Maybe it's something wrong with my computer. I'll see. JuntungWu 12:11, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

pic not updating

I reverted the pic Image:Angelina Jolie.jpg to an ealier vertion (if you care about the "whys" see Talk:Angelina Jolie#picture) but in any case, this pic is used at Angelina Jolie which doesn't seem to be reflecting the change. I thought maybe it was jsut a time dependent thing but I did it 13 hours ago. To see what I mean, go to Angelina Jolie, see the pic and then click on it and it takes you to a different pic. (Control + F5 is not the answer this time) Cavebear42 09:06, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

There seems to be a general problem with images disappearing. RickK 09:11, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

I noticed this myself. Three images I uploaded showed up as question-marks-in-boxes for several minutes. I was patient and the problem with these particular images resolved itself. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:48, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Diffs have stopped working

All of a sudden, when I try to do a diff (on any article's history), I get:

Error From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found, named "Pope John Paul II (Diff: 10611117, 0)". If it is a recently changed page, trying again in a minute or two will usually work. Alternatively, you may have followed an outdated diff or history link to a page that has been deleted.

If this is not the case, you may have found a bug in the software. Please report this to an administrator, making note of the URL.

(note that the Pope John Paul II above is just an example. each diff uses the name of the article I'm looking at) RickK 09:51, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

Nanotechnology

Can someone review the extensive nanotechnology interview on Feb.26 on the Coast to Coast AM radio network, which interview for its subscribers can be heard on-line for the next 90 days?

Where's the template for the >32K warning?

...the one that says

WARNING: This page is ### kilobytes long. Please consider condensing the page and moving the detail to another article so it is not approaching or in excess of 32KB."

(For my motivation in asking, see: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Soften the 32K warning?)

Dpbsmith (talk) 15:39, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Looking at the source for mediawiki 1.4 beta 4 (which may be out of date) that string is part of the mediawiki dist, and doesn't come from a template. Technically it's a string labelled "longpagewarning" which is inserted into the page by editForm() in EditPage.php. The string is defined in all the different language files (in the case of EN, that's just Language.php). So it'll either need a developer to change, or a bugtrack request raised to change mediawiki to get the text from a template (which isn't, I think, an unreasonable request). -- John Fader 16:58, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
All messages that have string labels like that have defaults that are set in Language XX.php in the source code, but they can be overridden by template-like pages in the mediawiki namespace. For this message, see mediawiki:longpagewarning. To edit it, you don't need help from a developer; you need help from an admin (who can edit protected pages in the mediawiki namespace). To request a change to the text, try mediawiki talk:longpagewarning. —AlanBarrett 17:57, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

linking/integrating Wikipedia search results

Hello!

-I would like to create a search tool that sends a query to Wikipedia's integrated search (among other sites), and creates a single results page that integrates the results from the various sources (as links back to those sources, of course). Is this possible/allowed, and do you know if anything along these lines has been done? Any guidance you can offer is a big help.

Thanks in advance, Dieter

Well, for one thing, you will have to comply with the limitations on bots. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:23, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)
Fair enough -- I'm happy to do so. I wasn't talking about anything automated; this would be user-driven, where a person enters a search query on a website, the site in turn submits the search to a number of engines (including Wikipedia), and then shows the combined results on a page. Do you think this is possible/allowed? -- dieter.randolph | Talk

spacing in automatic footnote proposal

A problem with spacing after links in Intenet Explorer has been discovered in my new automatic footnote proposal. It's maybe not a killer problem but it does look ugly. Images taken from Galeon and from Internet explorer are shown on the talk page. The generated HTML looks like this, so there's no space being output by MediaWiki.

...proposal<sup id="fn_autonumber_back" class=" plainlinks"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnote3#fn_autonumber" class='external' title=" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnote3#fn autonumber" rel="nofollow">[1]</a><span class=' urlexpansion'> (<i>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnote3#fn_autonumber</i>)</span></sup>. The...

Can anybody please suggest how to fix this? Mozzerati 08:03, 2005 Feb 28 (UTC)

It will probably have something to do with how the CSS rules for class=plainlinks and class=external are handled. class="external" means "add a little arrow icon to mark an external link", while class="plainlinks" means "no, don't add the arrow icon". IE is apparently leaving space for the arrow icon, but not displaying the icon itself. Opera does the same thing. The problem might be due to a browser bug, or an error in the CSS, but either way it is probably something that could be fixed or worked around in the CSS. You could try asking at Mediawiki talk:Monobook.css. —AlanBarrett 15:53, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Apparently the fix is known, but no admin has yet edited the CSS to implement the fix. See Mediazilla:714, Mediazilla:1516, Mediawiki talk:Monobook.css#class="plainlinks" fix. —AlanBarrett 20:36, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, I'm going to copy this to the talk page of the proposal. Mozzerati 20:44, 2005 Mar 2 (UTC)

For the record: this is a relatively major problem on Mozilla/Firefox/etc and a rather minor problem on IE.

I'm sure everyone's seen this problem - the section edit links are pushed down by images (see User:SPUI/RI 10). Is the solution in RI 10, where a table is used to put the images to the right of the text, "acceptable" by the cabal? If not, what should be done? Is there a fix in the works? I know the images can be moved down into the sections, but this doesn't always work with bigger screens or smaller font sizes. --SPUI (talk) 22:10, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean. I see nothing unusual or objectionable in the formatting of section edit links in User:SPUI/RI 10. The images appear on the right, each heading has a section edit link on the same line as the heading, and the text wraps nicely around the images. I tried several combinations of font size and window width, without seeing any bad effects. If you see something wrong, please describe it, or post a screenshot. —AlanBarrett 22:47, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
What browser are you using? I'm using K-Meleon, and the edit links for the route and history sections are pushed down almost to the bottom of history. See Image:fucked edit links.png. --SPUI (talk) 23:21, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I am using Opera, and I don't see anything like that. I suspect a CSS issue. You might get better help at Mediawiki talk:Monobook.css. —AlanBarrett 15:59, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I;m not sure that I would; I'd probably get technical explanations that I won't understand because I don't know CSS. --SPUI (talk) 17:35, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I've managed to 'fix' it in RI 10; unfortunately it will only work if the images are all the same width (otherwise we'll have extra whitespace). --SPUI (talk) 01:31, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Apparently the fix looks like shit in Safari, so User:K1vsr is changing them back to the tables. I love extra whitespace. --SPUI (talk) 17:45, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Eh, I've posted on MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css#fucked up section edit links - CSS or Mozilla issue?. --SPUI (talk) 17:57, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Your insults have caused me to lose interest in helping you. —AlanBarrett 20:30, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've removed and reworded a couple things that could be considered personal attacks; my object is nothing of the sort. Let's deal with the real issue, the rendering problems. --SPUI (talk) 22:10, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

A screenshot in IE: Image:IE SPUI R10.gif. Due to the window size, the top edit overlaps the image; this normally doesn't happen. It's still pretty much in the right place. Would it be possible to change the way the section links are handled to have them just as normal text next to the heading? Or does that cause other problems? --SPUI (talk) 22:10, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

East Anglian Railway Museum / East Anglia Transport Museum

The East Anglian Railway Museum page appears to link to itself several times when looking under the "what links here" page. Can this be fixed?

Also the "what links here" page doesn't show any links for the article on East Anglia Transport Museum doesn't work (when at least Lowestoft and Suffolk pages do). This page also shows up as a linking to the template Template:British heritage railways when in fact it does not.

(Our Phellap 15:52, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC))

New template to help linking to templates

Hi, I've just created a new template at Template:TemplateLink to help people link to template pages. I got bored trying to get my head round the awkward syntax every time I wanted to link to a template page, for example in category:computer stubs, and so created this as a tidy solution. You can use it by typing {{TemplateLink|template_name}}. For example:

{{TemplateLink|VfD}}.

which will create the text

{{VfD}}.

I hope people find this useful. Please let me know if I should publicise this elsewhere. --HappyDog 05:27, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • Template:TemplateLink is a duplicate of Template:Template. Well, they have slightly different code, but identical purpose. The code in Template:Template is written in a weird way, probably as a workaround for a bug that has now been fixed. I suggest that you merge the two templates and then request that Template:TemplateLink be deleted. (I think it's a speedy delete candidate in terms of WP:CSD rule "General 7", so just add "{{deletebecause|original author no longer wants this}}" to the top of the template.)
  • There's also {{tl}} which has existed for some time. _R_ 17:52, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I had a good look for a template that performed this function amongst the help pages, but found nothing. I am happy for them to be consolidated. I chose the name because I thought 'Template' on its own was a bit confusing (though less so than tl). However, as long as the functionality is there I'm happy for any suitable name to be used. I would also suggest that this is incorporated somewhere in the help docs (somewhere findable!) --HappyDog 19:15, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Its full name is {{Template link}}, but I think it's very convenient to have a shortcut. This way, even lazy people will type {{Template link}} instead of the less useful {{Template link}}. _R_ 00:29, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
That was my bad; I tend to create templates for my own use and not document them anywhere. --SPUI (talk) 04:47, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
That's useful. In that case I would suggest that my {{TemplateLink}} is deleted. I will amend the pages I have already edited to use it. I would also suggest that {{Template}} is deprecated in a similar manner. Could we also get the details about this template option onto the help pages a bit more prominently? --HappyDog 01:06, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

IPstack template

Ancheta Wis 13:55, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC): This is what I saw when attempting to read the POP3 article:

Internet protocol suite
Application layer
Transport layer
Internet layer
Link layer
Fixed. -- John Fader 14:36, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Special pages

The special pages such as Short Pages and Uncategorized Pages have not been updating since the crash last week. Any idea when they will be back? - SimonP 16:22, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)

Interwikis for templates

It's long been bothering me that there's no convenient way to make interwiki links for templates: interwiki links on template pages will get included with the remainder of the template code and interwikis on discussion pages are disabled. To alleviate this, I suggest (and have already begun to implement) a {{Template interwiki}} template defined on all Wikipedias. All it does is providing a nice way of displaying interwiki links. Its use is demonstrated on Template Talk:Template interwiki. Thoughts and improvements welcome. _R_ 17:48, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Rollback error

Have any other admins been getting the below error message when trying to rollback vandalism? It doesn't happen often, but when it does clicking "reload" and "back" doesn't work, I have to go back to the history page, reload the diff and try again, and then it always works. I think it started sometime after the server crash a few weeks ago. Tuf-Kat 22:16, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)

There seems to be a problem with your login session; this action has been canceled as a precaution against session hijacking. Please hit "back" and reload the page you came from, then try again.
Nope.
Urhixidur 22:52, 2005 Mar 2 (UTC)

Hex values for colors suddenly stopped working

<font color="ff0000">caca</font>: caca

<font color="red">caca</font>: caca

What the hell? It happened about 1/2 hour ago, and it's happening again - the former is black, and the latter is red. --SPUI (talk) 05:30, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

They both look right to me. Isn't <font color="#ff0000">caca</font>: caca canonical, though? —Korath (Talk) 07:38, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)
<font color="ff0000"> is incorrect; a hexadecimal color must be prefixed by a #. Normally the tidy clean-up process will silently fix this for you, but a couple of the new machines hadn't been set up quite right, and you may have been intermittently hitting a server without tidy. This should be fixed now. --Brion 08:27, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)
Strangely, the above still has it without the #, and it works again. --SPUI (talk) 09:50, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, that's probably because of everything I said in the previous paragraph. --Brion 23:26, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
But why would it work, if it hasn't been "cleaned up"? Or is this something that's done to the HTML code? --SPUI (talk) 00:59, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
What usually happens is that html code generated by mediawiki is run through an html tidy program (maybe even htmltidy) which fixes a multitude of user-supplied sins. That's whay Brion meant above by "the tidy clean-up process". On a couple of the webservers that tidy function wasn't set up, so it let the bad html code through unfixed. If you'd looked at the same page via a different webserver (and you'd cleared the cache) you might have hit one of the servers that did have the tidy function setup, and you wouldn't have seen the problem. Now that all the servers are tidying correctly, the problem shouldn't be manifest at all. This wouldn't have happened, of course, if my suggestion of changing htmltidy to deliver painfull electrical shocks to the genitals of those who submit bad html had been implemented. -- John Fader 01:13, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I resently uploaded this image. I got it from here an indemedia site. According to here [1] images on Indymedia sites are free for non-profit re-use in the spirit of Copyleft. So I think we can use it but I'm not sure what copyrigt tag to put on it (there doesn't seem to be a copyleft tag). I have looked on Wikipedia:Image copyright tags. Sorry if I'm being thick.--JK the unwise 10:49, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I believe the correct tag would be {{CopyrightedFreeUse}}. — Asbestos | Talk 11:08, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Actually, come to think of it, I don't think that's correct (Free use isn't given for all purposes). I think {{CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat}} would be correct (See Template talk:CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat which gives this condition as a valid one). — Asbestos | Talk 11:27, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Cheers. Further question, why is there no copyleft tag, copyleft seems to be popular on the internet, particulay amoung the anarchist set. Is it because copyleft is to underdefined as a concept and is not legaly regognised?--JK the unwise 13:01, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Basically, yes. GFDL is a copyleft. So are all the Creative Commons licenses. Their terms are very different. -- Jmabel | Talk 18:01, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)
Non-commercial only images are not in general used here, except by other arguments (like fair use). --SPUI (talk) 00:08, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Why? If not why do we have tags for it? Can't understand why it would be a bad thing since Wikipedia itself is released on that kind of copyright (is it not?)--JK the unwise 08:49, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is released under the GFDL, which allows commercial use. --SPUI (talk) 08:54, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Just had another look at Indymedia page [2] and the text on copyright status hyperlinks the word Copyleft to this page [3] which goes on about GNU???? Anyway do I need to email them then to try to get permision to use the images?--JK the unwise 09:16, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I think you have to. Images with the non-commercial provision are not compatible with the GFDL and will (eventually) be deleted. – flamurai (t) 09:25, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)

Global WikiTable cell stylesheets/templates

Hi, I have a question about stylesheets. We are currently in the middle of discussing table colour changes, but I'm thinking of the enormity of changing all the colours of all the table rows (see this example. Each row represents a different political party).

I was wondering if we could apply a CSS-type of scheme to these Wikitables. Instead of picking out a specific colour for each Liberal row for each year in which they are mentioned in these Canadian federal results articles, I'd like to create a style, and attribute it to a row (like class="liberal"), and store the colour scheme in a central template or style sheet. That way, if people down the road want to change the colour scheme again, all they have to do is modify the colour settings in the global file, instead of every table for every election year.

Is such a thing possible, and if so, how can I do it? If this is already covered in another article, I'd love to have a link to it. Thanks, Deathphoenix 15:23, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Note: By global, I don't mean across the entire Wikipedia, just among these tables (and possibly other Canadian political articles). --Deathphoenix 18:09, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

You could do it with templates. For instance, have a {{color/Liberal Party of Canada}} template containing 
bgcolor="lightcoral"
or only "lightcoral". It might even be a good idea to generalise this to all kinds of organisations or concepts. _R_ 19:33, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Ah, I didn't think of using the text templates like that. Thanks! --Deathphoenix 20:32, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Something's wrong with the "What links here" function, at least as far as the Attila Hörbiger page is concerned. I moved the page yesterday from Attila Hoerbiger (a very unusual spelling of his name) to its present site and added two new links myself, Burgtheater and List of people by name: Hor-Hov. Today I tried again because I want to check possible (double) redirects, but it still says "No pages link to here". What's wrong? Who can help/explain? <KF> 17:41, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

Somehow, we've ended up with two copies of the page in the database. This occasionally happens when an article is created when the servers are running particularly slowly and have become out-of-sync with each other, so the article creator gets an error message on saving the page, and tries to save it a second time. I do not in any way suggest that you or anyone else who worked on this article are at fault here; you have come across a Wikipedia bug (which I think has since been fixed).
The normal way to fix this is for an admin to delete the article and then undelete it. This isn't possible at the moment with this particular article because it was created almost a year ago and has been compressed to save database space. I think a developer needs to look at this.-gadfium 23:33, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Thanks a lot for explaining this. <KF> 18:29, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
I believe a similar thing has happened to the East Anglian Railway Museum and East Anglia Transport Museum pages (see above). Would it be possible to sort these pages please? (Our Phellap 19:26, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC))
Both of those pages turn out to have something called "block-compressed revisions" which currently make them impossible to delete-and-restore. (There's a complicated technical explanation for this, but the gist of it is that we just have to wait until it's fixed.) -Aranel ("Sarah") 20:00, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Both of these pages appear to have reverted to earlier versions. Can they be restored, or do they have to be rewritten? (Our Phellap 23:38, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC))

Category Intersection

Is there a way to perform the set intersection operation on two categories in wikipedia?

For example the page on Monkey Island is a member of the category '1990_computer_and_video_games'. It would be favourable to have such a page as a member of the categories '1990' and 'computer and video games'. The fact that the game is a video game from 1990 would be inplicit in it's membership of the two categories. If a user performs the set intersection operation on the two categories '1990' and 'computer and video games', a list of computer and video games from 1990 would be generated.

Also consider the page List_of_Irish_poets. If poets were categorised in the category 'poet', and Irish people were categories in the category 'Irish', by performing the set intersection of the categories 'poet' and 'Irish' a list of Irish poets would be dynamically generated.

This has been proposed before, and everyone agrees it would be a good idea, but there is no software support for it yet. I'm not sure where it is on the list of priorities. Does anyone know if there's a list of features to be added to MediaWiki with an indication of priority? I know about the Roadmap but it's so out of date as to be useless. Enhancement requests are supposed to go here, but that requires a login even to browse. This would appear to be Bug 1106 there.-gadfium 03:32, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)


Vandalism

On the page about Thomas Burgess (philosopher) someone replaced all the content with a charming ditty about ducks and kangaroos. I am not too good with Wiki yet, so could someone please fix it?

Fixed. To see how to fix such a thing yourself next time you see vandalism, see Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version.-gadfium 18:49, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)


Multiple instances of an article created

I created a redirect page, Suprasegmental feature, which redirects to Prosody (linguistics). However, I got a server error when I first submitted so I hit reload to try it again. I hit reload one more time when I got another server error. Now, it looks as if three instances of the page exists because when you go to Special:Whatlinkshere/Prosody (linguistics), you see three instances of Suprasegmental feature. How do I fix this? -- Umofomia 09:00, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Nevermind... looks like this notice that appeared soon after I made my post explains it:
This wiki is read only for about 30 minutes to remove duplicate articles and prevent more duplicate articles from being created. The actual duration is as long as it takes the two commmands to run.
Looks like it's fixed now. -- Umofomia 09:49, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

How come favicon doesn't work?

On my web broser (Firefox 1.0.1)The icon for wikipedia in my bookmarks isn't there, It's just the generic icon. The icon apears in the adress bar when i'm visiting wikipedia and works in bookmarks for other wikimedia projects (specificly Wikibooks and tlh:). Is this a bug with my browser? I hope this is the right place to post this, and apoligize if it isn't or has already been discussed. Bawolff 02:03, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I use Firefox and the icon has come up in my bookmarks fine. So must be something wroung with yours. --JK the unwise 09:56, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Try deleting and re-creating your bookmark: sometimes favicons get lost, or bookmarks get the wrong icons assigned. Re-creation of the bookmark usually works. There are numerous bugs with Mozilla/FF and its treatment of favicons, see for example [4]. User:Anárion/sig 10:19, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
ThanksBawolff 04:59, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Page move vandalism brouhaha

The wiki contains an optional hack to restrict page moves by the most recently registered users. I've engaged this mode on this wiki for now to discourage page move vandalism; most registered users should not be affected. (It's been on on de for some time.)

Note that when we upgrade to MediaWIki 1.5 (which should be sometime a couple months from now), page moves won't be as burdensome on the database, though of course they'll always be annoying. ;) --Brion 02:58, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

Titles

I want my title to be iPoder not IPoder. How can I modify the title to be iPoder and not always end up with the title IPoder?

You can't. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions) --Brion 03:15, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
But you can paste anything you want for a sig under your comments. —Michael Z. 2005-03-7 16:08 Z

Time sequence of history

How is it possible that the sequence of edits could look like this? Look at the times of edits[5]. The 13:01 edit was made after the 13:05 edit. I've seen this crop up on a few other pages, including here[6]. Rad Racer 04:11, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

There's something even more strange on this page. [7] The days are out of order for the edits. — J3ff 05:31, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
It looks like the same thing. Apparently, a null edit will put it back in order. Rad Racer 05:33, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Generally this is caused by a mix of deletion, page moves, and undeletion being used to combine the histories of two pages, where the one being undeleted has more recent edits than the one that was moved in place. --Brion 06:26, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
All the cases I've seen before look like artifacts of multiple page creation, as mentioned above in Multiple instances of an article created - the top revision is a duplicate of the initial one, except (sometimes) for the timestamp. Worse, simple editting - even a null edit - of the "current revision" of such pages change that original text. —Korath (Talk) 07:19, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
A couple of days ago, Jamesday ran a script to repair multiple page creation. I'm thinking it didn't work quite the way it should have. -- Cyrius|✎ 17:42, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Tilde

On this page Help:Page name it lists the "~" tilde as a character that can't be in a title. Is this because of a technical restriction? It doesn't list why as it does with many of the others. On the actual technical restrictions page, it doesn't mention the tilde at all. Just wondering? K1Bond007 20:10, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

Probably historic reasons: RFC 1738 (URLs) listed tilde as unsafe, because gateways and other transport agents are known to sometimes modify such characters (clause 2.2). Even if this is no longer always the case, consider how annoying the character is to some users: on many non-US keyboards the key just doesn't exist (its place is taken by another character), Portuguese users may be unable to easily type ~a, ~o or ~n (will become ã, õ, ñ), etc.. Even though RFC 2396, which replaces parts of RFC 1738, now lists tilde as safe, it is still recommended not to use a tilde (escape it as %7e). That's not even going into the fact a lot of server software suites use tilde for special uses, typically to mark the user's "home" directory (a Unixism). Since Apache is Un*x based, probably it uses the tilde like that (http://foo.bar/~baz/index.html would resolve to /home/baz/html/index.html on the foo.bar server). User:Anárion/sig 08:12, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

ERROR on every SAVE

Every time I click save, I get an ERROR message saying my transaction could not be completed, but the save takes place anyway. 66.60.159.190 20:59, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ditto, but no save takes place. Is there a squirrel loose in the servers or something? Mashford 21:07, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Most of the time, my edits are saved in spite of the error message. In fact, I had an edit conflict with myself one time. Strange! - Bevo 23:09, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have a different problem. When I press Save it often shows the preview and I have to press it once more. Just had to press it 5 times on one article before it finally stopped showing me the preview and went ahead and saved for me. violet/riga (t) 00:27, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Do you have problems logging in? Are you using the 'remember password' checkbox on login? --Brion 01:08, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)
I've been experiencing all of the problems mentioned above, and more, for the past few days:
  • Saves actually doing Previews
  • Saves repeatedly generating errors but occasionally saving anyway
  • Discovering Edit Conflicts with myself, typically resulting in two entries in the article history, the second of which is no change at all, presumably because it was the same Edit request.
I've periodically checked to verify I was still logged in, and haven't yet seen myself unlogged-in during these problems. The problem comes and goes, and seems worst when general access is extremely slow. — Jeff Q (talk) 20:19, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Clarification — the last Edit error I received was in the past half-hour, while editing Wikipedia:Village pump#Make your own nice-looking table. Rather than repeatedly pelt the server with Saves until I got no error, I waited a few minutes, tried the edit again, and found that my changes were in the Edit box already. I cancelled the Edit and hit my refresh at least seven times without getting a page showing the original edit had succeeded. Nevertheless, I checked the History and found my change listed. I finally closed my browser (Opera 7.23 on Win2k), reopened it, and fetched the page anew, to find my changes on the page. Some very weird stuff is still happening. — Jeff Q (talk) 20:28, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Besides experiencing all the above-mentioned oddness, I recently tried to do a sectional edit only to have the edit window open for the part of the page three sections below the one I clicked on. Rmhermen 23:34, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)

just what the hell is going on??

Ive just spent 5 minutes creatiing three pages and ONE HOUR getting submit timeouts trying to save them. in fact, ive given up, ive lost all three pages.

its not my PC, no other page or program lags.

its not the net, heres a tracert (leaving out the first 3 hops to protect my system):

  • 3 10 ms 10 ms <10 ms nott-t2cam1-b-v133.inet.ntl.com [80.4.46.205]
  • 4 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms nott-t2core-b-ge-wan71.inet.ntl.com [80.1.79.185]
  • 5 10 ms 20 ms 10 ms nth-bb-b-so-200-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.37]
  • 6 20 ms 40 ms 20 ms nth-bb-a-ae0-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.117]
  • 7 10 ms 20 ms 10 ms gfd-bb-b-so-400-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.98]
  • 8 20 ms 20 ms 30 ms bre-bb-a-so-000-0.inet.ntl.com [213.105.172.149]
  • 9 40 ms 40 ms 40 ms pari-ic-1-so-000-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.188.98]
  • 10 30 ms 40 ms 30 ms feth2-kara-ielo.freeix.net [213.228.3.203]
  • 11 40 ms 30 ms 40 ms feth0-bestelle.tlcy.fr.core.ielo.net [212.85.144.6]
  • 12 40 ms 60 ms 40 ms chloe.wikimedia.org [212.85.150.132]

but what i DO get is:

  • Sorry- we have a problem...
  • The wikimedia web server didn't return any response to your request.
  • To get information on what's going on you can visit #wikipedia.
  • An "offsite" status page is hosted on OpenFacts.
  • Generated Mon, 07 Mar 2005 22:55:37 GMT by will.wikimedia.org *(squid/2.5.STABLE4-20040219.wp20050114.icpfix.nortt.S7)

so the lag is internally in wikipedia. just what the hell is going on???

ive no doubt it may take up to an hour to save this page as well

Lincolnshire Poacher

I would like to echo everything User:Lincolnshire Poacher said and add that it is frustrating almost to the point of insanity. I am very willing to do my bit for the Wikipedia cause, but not at the expense of my wits. Jdcooper 00:50, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
It's obvious there is a problem. Editors and contributors should make a practice of saving their work offline before making changes to articles. In the meantime, let's wait a bit. Maybe it will work tomorrow. I'm in the same situation.--Fernkes 01:50, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)
The problem was lock contention. It should be fixed for now, a tweak to the software to reduce lock time was made. -- Tim Starling 04:34, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

May be fixed but I am finding it increasingly difficult to make saves without loosing stuff because the browser sometimes locks up preventing the usual method of recovery: using the back button to save your work or resubmit. In fact, in recent weeks or months, the interaction of my (IE) browser and Wikipedia has steadily gone down hill. The most noticeable problem is when hitting a link from outside to get to Wikipedia (I have a Wikipedia button on my homepage). For most (all?) URLs, that action starts the little MS flag waving and eventually, if there are delays, a progress bar opens up along the bottom of the window showing "progress" in retreiving the request. For Wikipedia, what now typically happens is immediately or very quickly upon submitting the URL request, the browser freezes up. The flag does not move and in fact the browser must be closed to get any buttons to work. This state is usually not permanent. With patience, the request is honored and Wikipedia appears, ora server error message appears ("There is a problem..."). But the behaviour is unlike anything I get with other URLs and wonder what could be the cause, as it occurs very fast sometimes - hard to image something has come back that fast from the Wikipedia servers? Am I alone in noticing this? - Marshman 00:56, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The strange case of the reappearing template

I've been stub-sorting, and have been having a lot of trouble with a series of articles on runes: Berkanan, Ehwaz, Haglaz, Isaz... most of Category:Runes, in fact. I edit them, remove the stub template and replace it with ling-stub (linguistics), and... it reappears in Category: Stub. None of the articles have the generic stub template, but they all turn up back in the main category, and they have "Stub" listed in the list of categories at the bottom of each article. I thought at first it was a time-lag problem, but that shouldn't last 24 hours. I've tried the delete/revert trick to see if that helps, as well, but that doesn't do any good either. Any ideas? Grutness|hello? 07:29, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Template:Ling-stub is listed both as Category:Linguistics stubs and Category:stub. The software works, you have to debug the user ;) -- Chris 73 Talk 07:38, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)
the sound you hear is that of User:Grutness slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand. Grutness|hello? 10:28, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Minor edits on User talk pages

Will minor edits on a user's talk page cause them to get a "You have new messages" message, or does it have to be a major edit? User:Alphax/sig 09:41, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Any edit triggers "You have new messages". _R_ 14:50, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Special:Randompage filtering

Is it possible for some pages with explicit material, eg this page to be filtered out of random-pages? I feel scared to do this in case I get spotted.--213.18.248.27 16:44, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Statistics Page

Does anyone know what has happened to the Wikipedia Statistics page? It hasnt been updated since Jan 1 .

Theon 19:12, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Try meta:Statistics - and your link is broken. URL links don't have pipes in them. The statistic page needs an SQL dump to be updated, which may not happen for a while (possibly some server issues). User:Alphax/sig 23:33, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Hello! Could anyone tell me if the databasedownloading of wikipedia comes with some sort of extracted overview of the internal links between the different wikipedia pages? Or if you know of anyone or somewhere other people have done this.

I am working on a project on IR retrieval and ranking of documents, and found the wikipedia database to be a great test-collection of documents. I will analyse the link structure within the documents to (hopefully) amend the ranking of the documents when searching. So my project is not focusing on link extracting from text, and therefor it would be nice if I didn't have to do an additional small project of extracting the links in the collection myself.

Anyways, thank you for a great product.

Sincerely, Glenn-Erik

The downloaded databse doesn't, but typically you'll run a script that comes with the mediawiki distribution which builds the link table (described at m:Links table. That gives you essentially the same functionality as "what links here", albeit with a limit of 500 in bound links per page (although that should be tweakable if you care more about correctness than performance). I forget what the script is calle, but it's something like remakelinks.php or somesuch. -- John Fader (talk · contribs) 17:00, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Or you could just download the links and brokenlinks table dumps along with the rest. --Brion 23:45, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)

Linking to edit pages

Is it possible to link to an edit/history page without having to type (for example) [http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&action=history]  ? Also, to link to a .....&action=edit&section=new would be helpful. For example, just by typing [[Wikipedia:Sandbox|action=edit]] Can anyone help?--212.100.250.217 17:04, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

About the closest you can get is [{{SERVER}}{{localurl:Wikipedia:Sandbok|action=edit&section=new}} comment goes here]. —AlanBarrett 17:53, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

ftp installation of wikimedia : MySql

I am planing to upgrade my own wiki (made with PmWiki ) to a mediawiki. Fact is 1-Ido not have local access to the servers (actually they are in other country) and 2 - even if I had, I wouldn't know how to do it. I konw bullies of MySql or pho. But I am planning to learn something. The user's guide tell me 

 database requirements
    If you don't have root access, you will need to create a MySQL database and a user for the database at your local host.
    If you have root access, the setup file will ask you for the root password and automatically setup the database for you.

I have no root acces (repeat, I have only basic FTP access to the server). Is there a easy way to create a MySql database, something like create a zerolenght file called myDatabase and upload it or something? I mean, how do I create this?

--Alexandre Van de Sande 23:01, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

This really depends on your hosting package. If it's not clear, MySQL is a program (and a big, fancy one at that) - one that needs to be running on your server for anything to work. So you'll need to check with your webhosting people. If they run mySQL (which many do) they should give you access to that (mysql has several communication protocols available) - but frankly if they don't give you shell access then I really doubt they give you mysql at all. If they don't have mysql running, and obviously you don't have permission to run arbitrary programs, then clearly you can't install it yourself and you're totally not going to get anything to work. -- John Fader (talk · contribs) 23:10, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Check if you have access to phpMyAdmin. Most hosts that give you MySQL should also give you PMA, which you can use to set up the databases. --Pidgeot (t) (c) (e) 09:49, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Image thumbnail wrong

(I use the classic skin. )In Latch the thumbnail is cropped at the rigjht edge. It is correct in the full sized image. What is going on? -- SGBailey 23:12, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)

Thumbnail looks fine to me (i.e the labels are visible). I suspect caching. -- John Fader (talk · contribs) 23:29, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hmm, it also looks fine at work on a different PC. I'll try at home agin later. Thanks. -- SGBailey 10:51, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)
On the same page I also see that <math>\bar Q</math> displays in math but <math>Q</math> displays as a normal Q. Why? -- SGBailey 23:18, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)
If your user preference is set to "display simple Formulas as HTML, it will render the Q as Text instead of an image. -- 213.23.219.107 23:35, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
OK. Thanks. -- SGBailey 10:51, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)

Smoothest way of tagging all articles

In advance of a more complex rating/metadata system, I'd like to start tagging all articles with one of 9 or 10 classification-tags, describing roughly its state of development. I want to do this in a way that automatically generates a list of articles in each class -- for instance, by using templates (via what-links-here) or categories (via the cat pages).

Putting a template in 100k articles is bad; hard on the server. How about having a category that contains 100k articles? How should one do this so that it is minimally stressful on the db? +sj + 23:27, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Generally, it is underirable to have more than 500 articles in a category – remember, the categories are generated, to a certain extent, on the fly, so it also puts a strain on the servers doing this too. What was it you were intending to do? Are you talking about grading the articles? Smoddy (t) (e) (g) 23:36, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That's a terrible idea. Somebody would surely come along behind you and remove them. RickK 05:32, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)

I think tagging the article development status is not good. Having stub and featured article tags is enough. There is, however, a related project on the german wiki de:Wikipedia:Personendaten, using metadata for biographies. This may be useful for database purposes. -- Chris 73 Talk 05:50, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)

Tagging like this is a very bad idea. Much better to have a per article voting mechanism where those data would be stored separate from the article. --mav 21:06, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Chris 73. Stubs for "really needs work"; featured articles that are "great". Every other stage of development in between is too subjective, and some folks might take any label personally. I haven't seen 'em yet, but I'll bet there have already been nasty wars over stub tags. I support the status quo. --Xiong 18:26, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)

Royal Society

The Royal Society have a list of all their fellows, foreign members and presidents at http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=1727 and I think this would serve as a useful indication of articles that are needed. There are 26 pdf files at http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=1727 thru http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/downloaddoc.asp?id=796 but a script is needed to go through and somehow arrange them from "surname, firstname" into "firstname, surname", and ignore the titles. Formatting doesn't appear to be preserved by copying out the text, which would be very useful in knowing which data are where so that they can then be jiggled. Any thoughts? Dunc|☺ 23:12, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Image on Wikiquotes boilerplate

I've noticed that the boilerplate for Wikiquote links (in wiki-coding, "{{wikiquote}}") does not display the Wikiquote logo. All other boilerplate links to WikiMedia projects (wiktionary, wikisource, etc) do display their respective logos, to the best of my knowledge. Has anyone else noticed this, or is this problem specific to my computer? Bbhtryoink 00:53, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It has been deliberately temporarily removed. See m:Image server overload 2005-03 for an explanation. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:23, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The live RC link on Special:Recentchanges, or rather the page [8] is broken--looks like broken MySQL permissions. Demi T/C 21:22, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)

Can't find the category

The article Quinquagenarian is in categories stub and number-stub. I can see the template for num-stub but I can't see why it is listed for category stub. Can some look at this and spot it for me, please? RJFJR 03:36, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)

It includes {{incomplete}}, which is a redirect to {{stub}}, which includes the category. JRM 03:48, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)

How to change article name

I just started an article for Denton Welch, but didn't capitalize his last name. Can I change this?

Golden Eternity

Yep, you can use the "move" tab on your screen to move the page to a new name. Just type the name correctly into the box at the bottom of the page. Joyous 04:43, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)
Very new users cannot use the "move" tab, as a vandalism-reduction measure. The appropriate action for such a user, or anyone who finds the "move" functionality scary, is to request a move at wikipedia:Requested moves.
I note that the article Denton welch is currently under suspicion of being a copyright violation. You should follow the advice in the notice on the page before you request a move.-gadfium 05:05, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Is it possible to have a comment associated with 'Move article'? This works well for edits. Bobblewik  (talk) 21:08, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Markup in galleries and image use on Commons

I have two questions:

  1. Can Wiki markup be used in the captions of images that are in gallery tags? I tried italicizing something and just got two pairs of apostrophes. Links work though.
  2. Is there any way to tell what articles on various language Wikipedias are using a certain image on Commons? Or does one have to go to each language that one is considering and run a search there?

Thanks! — Knowledge Seeker দ 08:50, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have two answers:
  1. No, it isn't. Right now it's using the mini-parser used for edit summaries. See bug 1015
  2. No, there isn't. I'd tell you to see bug 1394, but it's not terribly informative.
-- Cyrius|✎ 16:47, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, Cyrius, for that fast and helpful answer. Hope we can see them as future improvements then. — Knowledge Seeker দ 18:22, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Is "E-mail this user" broken?

I'm wondering if the e-mail function on Wikipedia is actually working. I sent some messages to other users and to myself, but nothing got delivered—even tough I have correctly set my e-mail address in my preferences. Has anyone sucessfully sent an e-mail recently? --Plek 14:15, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • Hmmm... Someone just sent me a test mail (thanks!) I guess that answers my question. Apparently WP is dropping emails to one's self, but is working normally for everything else. --Plek 16:50, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Instant Guaranteed Magic Fix for Server Performance Problems

Click this and put your money where your mouth is. --Xiong 19:41, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)

Nothing's instant when it comes to specing out and ordering big expensive servers. We've got money to spend on such things at the moment, although you're more than welcome to give more. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:07, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Bizarre screeshot/PNG bug

File:CT-SFH-003.png
CT-SFH-003.png

I uploaded this screenshot and could not see it: only a blank spot on the page. When I linked to it in the project image gallery, I saw an empty frame of the appropriate size (144x144px). I assumed it was a WP problem and fooled around several times trying to re-upload the image. Clearing the browser cache, quitting, even rebooting,waiting several hours (hoping WP would get right) all had no effect.

Turns out it has nothing to do with WP; I cannot see the image (as I originally uploaded it) in my browser (Mozilla 1.2.1 for Macintosh OS 9.2.2) even when I open the file directly from my local hard drive. Oddly, I can see it with other browsers. (!) I took the screenshot with Ambrosia Snapz Pro 2.0.1, which seems to add some nasty kiss-of-death scrap of code to the image which is preserved through edits and saves in PNG format; I tried Adobe Photoshop 4.0.1 and GraphicConverter 4.0.8. Nor does it seem to matter which kind of interlace or prefiltering is used. (!!) However, saving into GIF works fine. (!!)

I finally hit on the idea of opening the bad file and copying the image out (cut-and-paste) into a new file; this takes the bitmap of the image while leaving the KoD nastiness behind. This laundered image file displays fine both locally and after upload to WP. (!!!)

Even more bizzare: Other screenshots taken with Snapz Pro and saved directly (presumably with the nasty bit included) show up fine in Mozilla; but it's not only this one image that gave me trouble, but three in a row, all similar, but slightly different. (!!!!)

I'm fortunate that it was my browser that had the bug; if I'd seen the screenshot I'd have charged straight ahead and it might be ages before a frustrated reader had reported not being able to see the image(s).

You may be able to explore this bug by looking at older versions of the upload using the page's history. Please let us know what you see.

Recommendation: Workaround this problem proactively: Open all screenshots in an editor, copy the entire image, and paste into a new ("virgin") file/window, then save in PNG format; then upload to WP.

--Xiong 19:52, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)

Is search broken?

I haven't seen the in-house search facility for a long time. Is it broken? Bobblewik  (talk) 21:10, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It says Wikipedia search is disabled for performance reasons. You can search via Google or Yahoo! in the meantime. Just disabled because of load; perhaps it will come back when they have purchased new database servers. Thue | talk 21:32, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Rollup of section stubs

Curious: Do section stubs rollup anywhere? — Stevie is the man! Talk | Contrib 21:22, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • I, for one, have no idea what you mean by "rollup". -- Jmabel | Talk 21:26, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)

Any WP constructs for showing and checking off todo lists?

I was just wondering if anyone has done any work with regards to showing their todo lists (perhaps on their user pages) in any special way. It would be nice if there were some kind of wiki construct that made doing this more usable and trackable, esp. from the sense of an encyclopedia-wide rollup of everyone's todo's. After all, if somebody wants to beat me to working on one of my todo's, so much the better. — Stevie is the man! Talk | Contrib 21:27, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Binary/Octet-Stream Error

Every once and a while I get Firefox 1.0 trying to download a page instead of displaying it. If I try again it usually works fine. Is this a Firefox bug or is Wikipedia's server glitching out? WhackaWhackaWoo 23:21, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

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